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Who Is To Blame For Obesity?

A recent poll conducted by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked people what they thought were major vs minor causes for obesity.  You can find all the issues listed here (see question 3).  The two major reasons were:

People spend too much time in front of TV, video game and computer screens

And

Fast food is inexpensive and easy to find

82% thought the first issue related to TV was a major reason and only 14% thought it minor.  75% thought inexpensive, available fast food a major issue, 17% thought it minor.

Some discussion over at Reason.com suggests that these findings indicate people perceive “technology” as the most blameworthy category.  But, I think the fact that fast-food availability is the 2nd leading cause casts some doubt on this interpretation.

A more direct way to get at the issue of whether people perceive the problem to be one of personal responsibility, nefarious actions of “Big Food,” or the “food environment” is to directly ask.  That’s exactly what we did in the same survey I discussed in my last blog post.  I’m not going into the details much now because they are the centerpiece of a paper we currently have in review, but I will reveal some juicy nuggets.

We asked people to indicate for each of seven entities, whether they thought each entity was primarily, somewhat, or not to blame for the rise in obesity.  Here are the results with the % ascribing primary blame in parentheses.

Individuals (80%)

Parents (59%)

Food manufacturers (35%)

Restaurants (20%)

Government policies (18%)

Grocery stores (10%)

Farmers (4%)

It is remarkable that 80% say individuals are primarily to blame for obesity when one notes that over 69% of adults in the US are overweight or obese according to the CDC. It is comforting to see that people haven’t completely abrogated personal responsibility.

How Much Fatter are We?

I am working on a presentation I will give later in the month at the University of Alabama Medical School on the economics of obesity.  To put things in context, I wanted a graph showing the average weight of US men and women over the past 40 or so years.  If you think it would be easy to find this information on the web, you'd be wrong.  

There are lots of studies reporting the percent obese or reporting the mean BMI for a couple years, but the CDC, for some reason, hasn't complied a simple data set that lets you compare in the same units (their publications sometimes report means, sometimes medians, sometimes BMI, sometimes weight in lbs) for consistent age ranges.  After several hours work, I finally cobbled together the graph below showing the average weight (in lbs) of men and women from about 1960 to 2010 for people aged 40-49 (if you want to check me, the data was obtained from the publications here, here, and here, all of which rely on National Health and Nutrition Examination (NHANES) Survey).

Is it what you expected?  From about 1960 to today (or at least the latest comparable data I could find), the average weight of men aged 40-49 has increased 31.5 lbs.  For women, the number is 27.2 lbs.  In the past 10 years, the average weight of men aged 40-49 has increased 4.6 lbs.  For 40-49 year old women, weight actually fell 0.2 lbs over this time period.  In the last four years, the average weight of men in this age rage actually went down 1.7 lbs and the average weight of women fell 3.3 lbs.  

It is also worth mentioning that the average 40-49 year old male is today 1.3 inches taller than he was in 1960.  The average women is a full inch taller as well.

Whether these changes in weight are large or small are a subjective judgement call.  I will only point out that the average 40-49 year old women today weights about the same as the average 40-49 year old man from 1960.


weight over time.jpg

Better Hope Your Child Isn't Obese

Jerri Gray may spend the next fifteen years of her life in a South Carolina prison.  She is not a drug dealer or a serial rapist.  She has not robbed anyone or  committed grand theft  auto—she simply has an obese son

Those are the opening sentences of this article by Elizabeth Ralston in the Seton Hall Law Review entitled KinderLARDen Cop: Why States Must Stop Policing Parents of Obese Children

Is it Time to Reconsider High BMI as Dangerous?

An article in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by Flegal et al. presents some serious evidence to question the hysteria over the rise in obesity (see also the commentaries here and here and here).

Apparently being "normal" weight isn't optimal if your goal is to live longest.  In fact, being a bit overweight (and even a bit obese) might add a few years to life.  As Jacob Sullum over at Reason suggests, perhaps we aught to re-define what is meant by "normal" weight given that the majority of people have BMIs that are beyond the "normal" cagetory.  Not only do people weigh more than "normal" - their weights are such that they are living longer too.  

I've received quite a lot of flack from various folks over the comments in my TEDx talk a couple months back, in which I argued that the rise in the rate of obesity had declined or even stopped.  Yet, when I provide incontrovertible evidence to support my statements (see here or here), I'm often met with dismay, disbelief, and even claims of dishonesty.  This is not to mention the fact that heart disease and other such ailments have fallen dramatically.   

We have a well entrenched narrative that: 1) obesity is uncontrollably rising and 2) something must be done because obesity is killing people and increasing medical costs.  The cites in my TEDx talk disputes the first argument.  The results in the current issue of JAMA dispute the second.  There are those who derive their meaning (and power) by pushing for public health interventions to combat obesity.  My hope is that that the reasonable scientists in the group will rationally update their priors with this new information.